On Inter-County Conflicts And Their Coordination In Tourism Development

Though the study on relations between different tourist regions by foreign scholars began in the 1960s, it did not become a subject for Chinese researchers until the 1980s. While early studies focused on the competition among tourist destinations, the issue of conflicts among regions during the tourism development process failed to receive enough attention from governments, the tourism industry and the academic community.As the tourism industry continues to grow, tourism competition among counties has gradually stepped up and turned into increasingly intensifying conflicts.This paper aims to give a systematic study on the conflicts among regions in the tourism development process on the county level, with the example of Dong'an, Shuangpai and Ningyuan County being presented as a case study. Both theoretical and empirical, qualitative and quantitative approaches, as well as comparative approaches are employed. Theories involved in this paper include the theory of regional economic management, the theory of competitive edge, the game theory, economics of administrative regions and the theory of coordinated regional economic development.This paper consists of five parts:Partâ… IntroductionPartâ…¡The inter-county conflicts in tourism development and their influencePartâ…¢The causes of inter-county conflictsPartâ…£Coordination of inter-county conflictsPartâ…¤Summary Based on the analyses on the issue of inter-county conflicts and their coordination, this paper concludes that:1 A phenomenon found in tourism development on county levels, inter-county conflicts are both distinctive and universal.2 Inter-county conflicts are mainly represented by conflicts of tourism resources, tourism products(programs), tourism images and tourism markets, which are also the most evident and influential conflicts found in tourism development process in different counties.3 Besides the geographic vicinity, the conflicts can also be attributed to some more fundamental factors, such as fetters imposed by administrative system, interests gaming among regions and poor regional tourism management.4 The coordination of tourism conflicts among counties should follow a certain set of principles and should be carried out by governments on a higher level with cooperation from the county governments concerned and participation of non-governmental/civil parties. It also depends on the establishment and reform of the coordination management institutions and mechanisms, the improvement of assessment criteria for tourism development and government performance, the formulation of a scientific, complete tourism plan as well as the promotion of tourism cooperation among counties.